Tag Archives: Nick Bolton

One of the first filmmakers I interviewed was Michael Budd, who was in post production for his feature film Love of My Life. Very proud to announce the premiere is on April 11th in Sydney! Michael, you have The Art of Perseverance.

Walk the red carpet with Director Michael Budd as he brings his gritty Romance /Horror/Thriller, Love of my Life to the Chauvel Cinema, Paddington in an Australian first.

The Director/ Producer will be holding a Q&A along with the lead actor Diarmid Heidenreich. They will be talking about the many adversities they faced in getting the film made before and during production. “Love of my Life” has been huge in Germany and the USA, through VOD and DVD releases.

This is a one night only opportunity in Sydney, Celebrating the Red Carpet Premier, all public welcomed. Film title: Love of my Life Romance /Horror/Thriller A young man is held captive by a deranged surgeon and given the choice of surviving five days of torture to save the life of the woman he loves, or to order her killed and be set free.

Director: Michael Budd
(The Matrix Reloaded) (The Cold Light of Day)

CAST:Peter O’Brien (II)
Nominated, AFI Award Best Actor in a Leading Role Won, Silver Logie Most Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series . Won Silver Logie Most Popular Actor for Neighbours

Scorsese didn’t start making movies because he went to film school; he didn’t start making them because he came from a wealthy family, or because he grew up in New York, or because the stars aligned perfectly on the day of his conception. He started making movies because he loved cinema.

Hats off to my mate Ester Harding for launching the Sydney Chapter of Storycode.

Storycode chapters convene real life events designed to educate, inform and connect creators of immersive and interactive stories. At the core of the Storycode movement is the willingness to make, experiment and participate in growing a broad and expansive discipline which will spawn new immersive experiences, stories and technologies.

Their second meeting was on Thursday 28th August and I successfully applied to be one of 5 pitchers at the event, presenting The Art of Perseverance.
My presentation is below.
There was also a fascinating presentation from Michael Hughes at Soap Creative who developed the transmedia campaign for the new Aussie flick These Final Hours. We then got the added bonus of seeing the film for free!

It was a successful event, with a good number attending and great to catch up with lots of familiar faces. I think the pitch went down well and getting to meet Paul Wiegard from Madman was a bonus. He seemed keen to meet up and let me hear his version of The Art of Perseverance.

Here is a fascinating article from the Harvard Business Review that looks at why an individual or a company becomes successful, and conversely can then become a failure.

It can easily be applied to the film industry.
How often I have heard that when a director has clear vision on their project the rest falls into place.
Spend the appropriate time in development to find that clarity before you step ito the abyss of making a film. And its important to stay focussed on your core responsibilities and not take on too much.

Harvard Business Review Blog Network
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown | 10:00 AM August 8, 2012Full article here
Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases:

Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
Phase 2: When we have success, it leads to more options and opportunities.
Phase 3: When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts.
Phase 4: Diffused efforts undermine the very clarity that led to our success in the first place.

Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, success is a catalyst for failure.

Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times bestseller Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. He speaks at conferences and companies including Apple, Google and LinkedIn. He is a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum and did his graduate work at Stanford. Connect with him @GregoryMcKeown.

During my thesis interviews, one of the big questions I ask the filmmakers is ‘how do you not give up when you think you can’t go on?’. That ability to keep on going is a trait that all creatives must have. Or to put it another way, when your work is deemed to be a failure how do you get off the ropes.

The Importance of Failing was the third in The Saturday Sessions, a series of panel discussions put on by those fine people at The PACT Theatre, a venue that actively encourages a space for artists to experiment.

I viewed this topic as having similar themes to The Art of Perseverance and I was very grateful to spend 90minutes discussing The Importance of Failing with a diverse panel (see bottom) of varying creative disciplines in the arts. We were also joined by a medical researcher and an elite sportsman to give their non artistic perspectives of failure.

Sifting through my notes afterwards, the following key strands of thought hit home.

Measurement of success and failure
Sportsman Tom Decent started proceedings by stating how cricket is totally statistic based. You are out or you are not. When he was in a golden patch, he would write down the things he was doing right, so when he hit the inevitable barren patch he was able to recollect the positive things he was doing.

But the arts of course are subjective, and feedback is mostly of a qualitative nature. Laita Taumoepean pondered as to whether failure should be judged by the outcomes or the process, and she said she was much more interested in the process of the current project, and what she could learn from it to help her be better for the next project. Process doesn’t have finality whereas an outcome is final. She cited relationships with individuals, the organisation or the audience that she could take into the next project, as examples of process measurement.

Outcomes are hard to quantify when working with ideas. Augusta Supple quoted poet Sylvia Plath who said that whenever she sits to write a poem, she might plan for it to be about a chair, and then the poem becomes about a table, and that’s not bad, its just a change in expectation.

Director of Fine Arts at Parsons in New York and visual artist Simone Douglas said that we measure failure from the wrong perspective. If you don’t risk a big idea then you lead a safe life. If you don’t attempt, you don’t learn.
You get to know the most about yourself when you don’t succeed.

Internal and External EvaluationAugusta Supple offered the point of view that we are often our worst critics allowing the little dissenting voice in our head to rule our own inner confidence. She furthered this by saying that all humans have difficulty with the simple language of communication, and often when having to provide negative feedback, we say things we shouldn’t as we try to find the words to be diplomatic, and afterwards kick ourselves for what we said.
Then there are the external pressures of friends, families, bosses, and of course the dreaded review, where it is so easy to focus on the one negative comment and not congratulate yourself on the positive feedback.

The Art of Feedback
The performers amongst us discussed the torture that is the Foyer Feedback! That moment when friends awkwardly praise you, ‘it was… interesting….’.
When is the best time for giving and receiving feedback. Certainly not in the foyer when everything is a bit raw and immediate. Possibly in the bar later when things have settled down. More appropriately in the cold light of morning the next day.
One panellist advised that they have a formal structured debrief one week later in a safe environment which seems a great process for artistic evaluation.

Disassociation was discussed at length – the ability for us to think the worst when in actual fact it was fine for the audience. We performers often set our default to apologize for something yet if we don’t reveal the negative aspect in our eyes, the audience might not have noticed.
But also, so often in modern culture, positive praise is rarely given. Critique naturally highlights the things that need improving, yet rarely highlights the things that worked.
I did find the group a bit reluctant to embrace methodologies to critique their process. Corporate frameworks like Key Performance Indicators were almost sneered at, as was the administrative bureaucracy of arts grant applications and assessment (hoop jumping), yet personally I do feel that adequate accountability and self-responsibility is missing in the creative artists’ space.

Failure implies a point in time – think long gameKatie Pollock, a recent recipient of The Edward Albee Scholarship made a fine point that we only ever evaluate the current project, but rarely evaluate our development of over a year or five years for example. The group concurred that everyone wants success now. The current project is seen as the ‘be-all and end-all’. But art develops over time and projects.

Augusta Supple did say that traditionally the funding models have all been based around ‘Excellence’, whereas the artist’s journey is a long game methodology. Recently however, there does seem to be a shift to ‘artist development’ in addition to ‘project development’ by the funding bodies.

Indeed talking to Katie afterwards, we observed about how we rarely look back to the beginning of our career and our first performance, remembering how terrified but excited we were. We forget how far we have come, and often benchmark ourselves against the top level portrayed in the media. A portrayal that is increasingly being ‘perfect’; a utopian aspiration. Reality TV is infact an un-reality.

How did you feel when….
I also asked Katie the question I asked the filmmakers when they got their funding: ‘How did you feel on getting the news and knowing you have to make this thing?’ ie the point of no return, and you are committed to making this project happen. Katie expressed exactly the same response I got from the interviews – initial shock, followed by utter euphoria, followed by the ‘Oh Shit, I gotta deliver now’ fear. I mention this because it is another example of the little voice I was talking about earlier. But Katie did say that she loves, infact needs, the Oh Shit factor, it drives her on. And indeed I think the successful artist does need to have that ambition to test themselves on bigger canvases.

I always ask artists to sign the The Art of Perseverance postcard, describing their art of perseverance in a few words and I thought I’d share them with you..August Supple: stubborn, resilient, bold and long gameSimone Douglas: occlusion, trial error. perseverance is innovationKatie Pollock: I tried to stop and failed.

So it’s was an invigorating afternoon of honesty and insight into how we all deal with failure. Personally it gave me a perspective on how to improve giving feedback, and an insight in how to assess my own process and outcome. At the end of the day, if we fail as an artist, no one dies. If you are a medical surgeon on the other hand…….

Resources to check out
A few materials were referencedKathryn Schulz – Being Wrong Book – an adventure in the margin of error, in Wrongology.Stephen Pressfield – The War of Art
TED talk by Kathryn Schulz on Being Wrong

For more information on The Saturday Sessions, The PACT Theatre and their upcoming 50th anniversary celebrations in October, (hey they sure have The Art of Perseverance!), please check out http://www.pact.net.au/

Event Information:The Importance of Failing: It happens to all of us, so what’s the big deal? Saturday Sessions #3 is all about the forbidden ‘F’ word.

We all fail at some point and often we fail brilliantly. But do you fail and quit? Or do you get back up and try again? Join us in a discussion with sporting, entrepreneurial and arts experts about how their personal experiences of failing helped them take the crucial next step toward success. What did they learn from their mistakes? How did it make them stronger? Why is failing such an important part of growing and succeeding?

Come and share your stories, or just participate in a frank and open discussion about failure and why we should embrace and learn from it.

WHAT IS SATURDAY SESSIONS?
It’s an opportunity to talk!
It’s a chance to engage in critical dialogue with a vibrant cross section of established and emerging artists. It’s an informal environment to ask all those questions you’ve been wanting to. It’s about rigour and it’s about fun. It’s about taking some things seriously and others not quite so. It’s about meeting lots of new people or having a chat to someone you have wanted to for a long time. It’s about being bold. It’s about sitting back and taking it in quietly. It’s about you.

The Saturday Sessions work closely with the PACT program to bring a deeper understanding and connection to the work we make as artists and why we do it.

Came across this great blog Humans of New York and a story about a artist persevering with his career – see below. I read the ‘About‘ section on the website, and that too revealed an interesting journey in the creators journey, so have cut and pasted that here too.

I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months with this goal in mind, but somewhere along the way, HONY began to take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog. With over eight million followers on social media, HONY now provides a worldwide audience with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City. It has also become a #1 NYT bestselling book.. It’s been quite a ride so far. Feel free to follow along.

It seems that the more I tried to make my life about the pursuit of art, the more money controlled my life: collecting unemployment insurance, the humiliation of borrowing money from friends and family, tossing and turning at night while trying to figure out how to pay the rent. To survive I had to work hard jobs and afterwards I’d feel too tired and too stressed to paint. It’s very hard to create under those circumstances. Creativity is a delicate process. Often times I wonder if I should have just pursued a career for the first half of my life, obtained some degree of financial security, and then transitioned into art.”

Streamed live on 10 Jun 2014
If you are a filmmaker or other individual working in the film industry, you are trapped in a paradox. It is a time of tremendous opportunity, yet also a time of great hardship. The tools for creation and distribution have never been cheaper, yet only an elite few can actually make a living. This roundtable will look at how things could be different for a much broader range of artists of all sorts. Could we create a system that allows many more artists to create much more work that could be enjoyed by a much wider range of audiences? What would be needed? How would that work?

It’s the best of times and the worst of times to be a filmmaker. Check out what Paul Schrader, Ritesh Batra, Melissa Silverstein, Scott Foundas, Mynette Louie, and Austin Kleon had to share with me about how we can ReInvent Hollywood to better serve the artist. Reinvent Hollywood – The Artists﻿

Reinventors is a series of virtual roundtables done over the new medium of group video about how to fundamentally reinvent many of our 20th-century systems to work in the new realities of our 21st-century world.
Each session starts with an anchor interview of a remarkable “reinventor” who lays out his or her ideas on how to fundamentally reinvent a field, and that flows into a roundtable discussion with other experts and innovators who can build off those ideas.
The whole video conversation is streamed to a live audience through the web.
Reinvent America is the inaugural project that will launch in early 2013 and look at how to fundamentally reinvent America across many fields. How can we help the country make the transition to the all-digital, fully global, more sustainable world of the coming decades and take on the huge challenges that lie ahead?
If you’re interested in following this new kind of video conversation, get involved at: www.reinventors.net

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What is The Art of Perseverance?

It's a project that studies how filmmakers in Australia persevere during the process from development through funding, production, marketing and distribution and beyond.

The average film takes seven years to make. That's a lot of perseverance.

Over 40 (and counting) of Australia's top filmmakers and industry experts have been interviewed as to how they persevered in creating their film.

These insights are being passed onto the industry at large in the hope it inspires current and future filmmakers in Australia.

The documentary and eBook will be out in 2015 accompanied by a educational outreach program, and screening tour.

This website acts as a blog, a resource and as a forum for professional and emerging filmmakers, as well as industry professionals and in-fact anyone interested in entrepreneurialism, filmmaking and perseverance.